Santos managed to earn a unanimous decision over Chandler at the latest UFC on ESPN event, but that didn’t stop her from sharing how angry she was over the weigh-in situation.
Despite winning her UFC on ESPN fight against Chelsea Chandler, Yana Santos is still pretty annoyed with her opponent for missing weight by a whopping five pounds.
Chandler ( a former featherweight fighter) hit the scales on Friday morning at 141 pounds, five pounds above the 136 pound limit for bantamweight scraps. That left Santos steaming — it’s not just disrespectful to an opponent who actually went through hell to make weight, it probably gave Chandler a serious size and cardio advantage as well.
Santos used a strong kick game to keep the heavier Chandler at bay for the first two rounds of their fight. But in round three Chandler seemed to be the fresher of the two (shocking, we know!) and used her size to attack Santos in the clinch. It was too little too late, though: judges ended up scoring the first two rounds for Santos, giving her a 30-27, 29-28, 29-28 unanimous decision.
“It pissed me off so much,” she told Michael Bisping after the win. “I didn’t want to fight. Thankfully my team and management were telling me, ‘No, you can do this.’ I just feel that it’s so unfair. For two months, I’m eating super clean, I’m a big girl and I’m doing my best to always be on weight.”
“I feel like this girl not try, she came fat, she didn’t try to make weight. It’s impossible to miss five pounds and not say anything, not say, ‘Sorry, I feel bad,’ or something. Just miss and go, so it made me very angry.”
Chandler wasn’t the only fighter to miss weight badly for this ESPN card. Chepe Mariscal came in 3.5 pounds overweight and ended up crushing his opponent with two 30-25 scorecards. The fact that he was so ashamed he “didn’t even want to come to the arena” is probably small consolation for his opponent Damon Jackson, who may have gotten a percentage of Mariscal’s purse but loses his win pay.